Notebook designs with graphics modules are not a new concept. The industry has long acknowledged that modular designs are the best way to shorten the notebook design cycle and deliver the latest GPUs to market faster. Historically, this was achieved with proprietary module designs customized for specific vendor platforms.

Dozens of AGP notebooks used proprietary graphics modules for years, allowing manufacturers to accelerate time to market for a particular platform design. Most customers are never aware that their systems have a modular design, because they never open up the notebook chassis. The downside is that these modules are different from each other in almost every way, and still require custom designing for each graphics card.

Just as proprietary modules accelerated the design cycle for particular notebook designs, MXM will let notebook manufacturers accelerate the design cycle for notebooks designed with the MXM graphics interface. Furthermore, hardware manufacturers like NVIDIA will commit to releasing reference designs for MXM modules with their latest graphics hardware. This will let notebook manufacturers plug any MXM reference module into their systems simply by putting an MXM connector on the system motherboard. This model has worked extremely well for desktop systems for years, and now MXM extends this benefit to notebook systems.